Biography
Department of History Affiliate
Southeast Asian Studies Affiliate
Department of Gender & Women’s Studies Affiliate
Dr. Sabrina Thomas is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at UW-Madison. Her research takes a transnational approach to the intersections of race, nation, and war and examines questions of citizenship, identity, and diaspora through the legacies of children born from international conflict. Her first book, Scars of War: The Politics of Paternity and Responsibility for the Amerasians of Vietnam, (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) considered the issue of U.S. citizenship for the Amerasian children of Vietnam. Scars of War was awarded the 2021 “Best First Book” prize from Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society and was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. Dr. Thomas is the author of numerous articles including “Blood Politics: Reproducing the Children of ‘Others’ in the 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act” published in the Journal of American-East Asian Relations (2019), and “When War Creates Life: Race, Nation, and Belonging for Children Born from War,” to the Cambridge History of War and Society in America (2026). She is currently working on her second book, The Soul of Blood and Borders: Brown Babies, Black Amerasians, and the African American Response. Prior to Texas Tech University, Dr. Thomas was an Associate Professor and the David A. Moore Chair of American History at Wabash College. She earned a B.A. in History from Colorado State University, M.S. in Counseling from Butler University, and Ph.D. in History from Arizona State University. Her recent interview on the podcast, Military Historians are People Too, is now available on Apple podcasts.
Scars of War examines the decisions of U.S. policymakers denying the Amerasians of Vietnam—the biracial sons and daughters of American fathers and Vietnamese mothers born during the Vietnam War—American citizenship. Focusing on the implications of the 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act and the 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act, Sabrina Thomas investigates why policymakers deemed a population unfit for American citizenship, despite the fact that they had American fathers.
Thomas argues that the exclusion of citizenship was a component of bigger issues confronting the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations: international relationships in a Cold War era, America’s defeat in the Vietnam War, and a history in the United States of racially restrictive immigration and citizenship policies against mixed-race persons and people of Asian descent.